romance

From Friday 3 May the Fondazione Memmo is presenting Romance, a solo exhibition by the Franco-Moroccan artist Latifa Echakhch, curated by Francesco Stocchi.

Romance  stems from the Fondazione Memmo’s invitation to Latifa Echakhch to carry out a completely new project based on the impressions that the encounter with the landscape atmosphere, history, society and culture of Rome have made on her. The exhibition originates from a process in which the artist has gradually come closer to the city, allowing her to discover, internalize and translate the feelings it has stirred in her over the course of her visits.

The title of the exhibition, Romance , sums up the spirit of Latifa Echakhch’s intervention, aimed at representing the various architectural, cultural and geological strata of a city in which different historical periods are intertwined and a multiplicity of languages and expressive ranges are jumbled together. The artist sets out to convey this sense of fascination, intrigue and surprise through an installation realized in the spaces of the Fondazione Memmo (the former stables of Palazzo Ruspoli): an immersive, unprecedented work that recalls – both conceptually and in the technique adopted – the architectural “follies ” built out of concrete that adorned the gardens of the late 19th century.

Latifah Echakhch will work on site to develop a journey made of installations, punctuated by a series of hollow sculptures made of reinforced concrete; from the latter decorative objects from different origins will emerge, creating a stratification of cultured and popular references. The journey will be articulate in the exhibition spaces of Fondazione Memmo and invite the viewer to wonder, between caves, stalactites and stalagmites, fakenwooden fences and everyday objects.

In the exhibition project for Fondazione Memmo is possible to recognize the various directions that have marked Echakhch’s research in the last few years. In 2018 the artist engaged with the theme of romantic gardens in Le jardin méchanique , at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; with the one of stratification of traces in architectural works at the Chapelle Saint-Jacques in Saint Gaudens; and the one of the evocative power of the neglected and deteriorated object, as in case of the broken bell exhibited in her solo show at Kiosk in Ghent. Romance  shows the rigour of Latifa Echakhch, the most recent example of a creative flux composed of references and anticipations that make possible to grasp the poetics of the artist.

This exhibition marks another stage in the process by which the Fondazione Memmo is aiming to foster an encounter between artists from different countries with the fabric of production and the crafts in the city of Rome through the staging of exhibition projects that take a new look at traditional materials and techniques.